John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America

[lovemydog]

I'm cross-posting this here because I find it fascinating reading. The entire article. I posted it in general discussion last night.
http://www.democraticunderground.com/10027407787
I'm not sure about the rules or traditions for cross-posting here at DU. If anyone can let me know I'd appreciate it. Any way, please consider reading this entire article. Among the many fascinating facts and issues, something is raised that I've been thinking about a lot lately - the importance of learning history.

Drew Gilpin Faust DECEMBER 17, 2015
for The New York Review of Books

The historian John Hope Franklin, who died in 2009, would have turned one hundred this year. I have thought of him often in recent months as we have seen a conservative Republican governor call for the removal of the Confederate flag from the South Carolina State House grounds, as the Democratic Party has renamed the Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner in order to distance itself from two slave-owning forebears, as Yale University debates removing the name Calhoun from one of its undergraduate colleges.

Many Americans in 2015 seem to be undertaking an unprecedentedly clear-eyed look at the nation’s past, at the legacy of slavery and race that has made us anything but a colorblind society. There could be no more fitting tribute to Franklin’s one hundredth birthday than this collective stock-taking, for no one has done more to delineate the contours of that shameful legacy and to insist upon its importance to America’s present and future. And in that effort he has also done something more for history itself: insisting not just upon its relevance, but indeed its preeminence as the indispensable instrument of change and even salvation from legacies that left unexamined will destroy us. “Good history,” he remarked in 1989, “is a good foundation for a better present and future.”

Franklin’s childhood in segregated Oklahoma introduced him to racism’s cruelties at an early age. He was just six when he and his mother were ejected from a train for sitting in a white-only car. His father was so embittered by his treatment as a black lawyer that he moved his family to an all-black town after resolving to “resign from the world dominated by white people.” Yet Franklin’s parents insisted that he was the equal of any other human being, and his mother repeatedly urged him to tell anyone who asked him about his aspirations that he planned to be “the first Negro president of the United States.” If you believe in yourself, his mother urged, “you won’t be crying; you’ll be defying.”

Defying, not crying. That captures John Hope Franklin’s life, and it captures the history he wrote, a history that would, in his words, “attempt to rehabilitate a whole people” and serve them as a weapon of collective defiance. Inspired by a brilliant teacher at Fisk University, Franklin came to see how “historical traditions have controlled…attitudes and conduct,” and how changing history, challenging the truth of the “hallowed past,” was the necessary condition for changing the present and future. In important ways, the study of history was for Franklin not a choice; it was an imperative. “The true scholar,” he wrote in 1963, “must pursue truth in his field; he must, as it were, ply his trade…. If one tried to escape,…he would be haunted;…he would be satisfied in no other pursuit.” History, in the many meanings of the term, chose him.

much more here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/john-hope-franklin-race-meaning-america/

[lovemydog]

1. More on Franklin:

John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian of the United States and former president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, and the Southern Historical Association. Franklin is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947, and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.

Early life and education
Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin (1879-1957) and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University.

Franklin's father Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, aka "Amazing Buck Franklin." He was of African-American and Choctaw ancestry and born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory (formerly Pickens County). He was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a former slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and three-fourths African-American ancestry. Buck Franklin became a lawyer.

Buck Franklin is best known for defending African-American survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race riot, in which whites had attacked many blacks and buildings, and burned and destroyed the Greenwood District. This was known at the time as the "Black Wall Street", and was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a center of black commerce and culture.[3] Franklin and his colleagues also became experts at oil law, representing "blacks and Native Americans in Oklahoma against white lawyers representing oil barons." His career demonstrated a strong professional black life in the West, at a time when such accomplishments would have been more difficult to achieve in the Deep South.

John Hope Franklin graduated from Booker T. Washington High School (then segregated) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated in 1935 from Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, then earned a master's in 1936 and a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University.

Career
"My challenge," Franklin said, "was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly."
In his autobiography, Franklin has described a series of formative incidents in which he confronted racism while seeking to volunteer his services at the beginning of the Second World War. He responded to the navy's search for qualified clerical workers, but after he presented his extensive qualifications, the navy recruiter told him that he was the wrong color for the position. He was similarly unsuccessful in finding a position with a War Department historical project. When he went to have a blood test, as required for the draft, the doctor initially refused to allow him into his office. Afterward, Franklin took steps to avoid the draft, on the basis that the country did not respect him or have an interest in his well-being, because of his color.

In the early 1950s, Franklin served on the NAACP Legal Defense Fund team led by Thurgood Marshall, and helped develop the sociological case for Brown v. Board of Education. This case, challenging de jure segregated education in the South, was taken to the United States Supreme Court. It ruled in 1954 that the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional, leading to integration of schools.

more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Hope_Franklin

[Number23]

2. "Defying, not crying." I LOVE that

Thanks, lmd.

[lovemydog]

4. "Defying, not crying."

I love it too. Here's more from the article on it:

And again (or still) he worried about willful distortions of history—this time including more recent emerging histories—that threatened to undermine the nation’s capacity to confront and eliminate racial injustice. The myth of a colorblind society, often erected upon a cynical celebration of the achievements of civil rights legislation and the Voting Rights Act, was being developed in the 1980s and 1990s, Franklin believed, to end the struggle for racial equality by proclaiming it already achieved. “A color-blind society does not exist in the United States,” Franklin stated emphatically to his Missouri audience, “and never has existed.” But to advance the myth, Franklin asserted, was not simply a delusion; it was a far more pernicious act of bad faith. “Those who insist we should conduct ourselves as if such a utopian state already existed have no interest in achieving it and, indeed, would be horrified if we even approached it.”

Brown had, in Franklin’s words, been “no magic wand.” “Litigation, legislation, and executive implementation, however effective some of it was, did not wipe away three centuries of slavery, degradation, segregation, and discrimination.” Color remained “a major consideration in virtually everything Americans thought, said, or did.” Rodney King’s beating was clear testimony to the persisting force of race. Today, more than twenty years later, Franklin could deliver the same message. We are neither colorblind nor post-racial. Franklin would have been deeply saddened, but I doubt he would have been surprised, by the events in Ferguson, Staten Island, Charleston, Cleveland, Baltimore. He would have been equally saddened and, one guesses, angered by the recent evisceration of the Voting Rights Act and by the threat to student body diversity in higher education implied by the Supreme Court’s decision to reconsider Fisher v. University of Texas.

In the last months of his life, Franklin was buoyed by the rise of Barack Obama, which he declared “amazing.” “I didn’t think it would happen in my lifetime.” He dared hope that the nation had “turn[ed] a significant corner.” But he knew that erasing the color line required far more than electing a black president. Until we had a new history, we could not build a different and better future. The fundamental requirement, what we

need to do as a nation and as individual members of society is to confront our past and see it for what it is. It is a past that is filled with some of the ugliest possible examples of racial brutality and degradation in human history. We need to recognize it for what it was and is and not explain it away, excuse it, or justify it. Having done that, we should then make a good-faith effort to turn our history around.

In other words, it is history that has the capacity to save us. “Historians to the rescue!” Dare we think that the recent rejections of Confederate symbols and of the reputations and legacies of slaveowners might be the opening for such a revisionist and clarifying effort? How can we lodge the truth of history in national discourse and public policy?

In an editorial on September 4, 2015, The New York Times underscored how a full understanding of history must be at the heart of any resolution of America’s racial dilemma. In words that come close to echoing Franklin’s, the Times wrote of what it called the “Truth of ‘Black Lives Matter’”—a truth rooted in the legacies of the past. “Demonstrators who chant the phrase,” the Times noted,

are making the same declaration that voting rights and civil rights activists made a half-century ago. They are not asserting that black lives are more precious than white lives. They are underlining an indisputable fact—that the lives of black citizens in this country historically have not mattered, and have been discounted and devalued. People who are unacquainted with this history are understandably uncomfortable with the language of the movement.

Only if we understand and acknowledge this past can we grapple with the conflicts of the present and the promise of the future.

“To confront our past and see it for what it is.” Franklin’s words. The past “is.” Not the past was. The past lives on. What would it mean to confront it, to see it clearly? Recent history can offer us some examples of nations that have taken on the burden of their history. Germany and its Nazi past. South Africa and apartheid. The principle, and in South Africa an explicit policy and practice, was that of “truth and reconciliation,” a recognition that only a collective investigation and acknowledgment of past wrongs can exorcise them and liberate a nation and a people for a better future. History must move beyond the academy, must become a recognized part of everyday life and understanding for all those who would themselves be free from its weight.

[Kind of Blue]

3. Thank you, lovemydog, for this remembrance

of Prof. Franklin. It's so important never to forget because it's the easiest thing to constantly twist history. It's amazing to me that conquered people can actually speak out and change their path. I'm so grateful to him and so many other historians.

"Fundamental to the task at hand would be rewriting the history of history, revising the 'hallowed' falsehoods, illustrating how the abuse and misuse of history served to legitimate systems of oppression not just in the past but in the present as well. Misrepresentations of the past, Franklin came to recognize, had given 'the white South the intellectual justification for its determination not to yield on many important points, especially in its treatment of the Negro.' Post–Civil War southerners had endeavored to 'win with the pen what they had failed to win with the sword.'” Brilliant statement.

[lovemydog]

5. Speaking out and changing their path.

Yes, KoB that's what's so exciting about history. Using it to find inspiration and continue changing the current path. Away from ignorance. Toward inclusion and participation. I think you'll enjoy this excerpt, about examining history and applying it to today's world. That's something we do in this group:

Ta-Nehisi Coates, nearly sixteen years younger than Bryan Stevenson, was born six decades after John Hope Franklin. Martin Luther King was seven years dead; much of the hope of the civil rights movement had evaporated; racism, bitterness, and a combination of militancy and despair prevailed. Coates’s father, a former member of the Black Panther Party, was an initially self-taught intellectual who became an archivist of black history and created a press to share the record of those of African descent from ancient Egypt to Marcus Garvey to Attica. Paul Coates grounded his son “in history and struggle,” lessons that would make Franklin’s work seem a bit old-fashioned, conciliatory, perhaps even compromising.

It was Malcolm X who became Ta-Nehisi’s hero. “I loved Malcolm because Malcolm never lied…. He was unconcerned with making the people who believed they were white comfortable in their belief.” Coates resisted white tools or rules. And he would flee the academy—dropping out of Howard without completing a degree. But he too embraced history. “My reclamation,” he wrote, “would be accomplished, like Malcolm’s, through books, through my own study and exploration.” Perhaps, he mused, “I might write something of consequence someday.”

It would seem he has done just that. On the second page of his recent meditation on race, Between the World and Me, Coates proclaims, “The answer is American history.” His own deep immersion in the past—“I have now morphed into a Civil War buff,” he confesses—served as epiphany and impetus: “I could not have understood 20th-century discrimination without understanding its 19th-century manifestations.” Searching for a deeper understanding of the forces underlying the realities of black oppression that he already knew so acutely, Coates turned to scholarship and the traditions of African-American history that John Hope Franklin had done so much to build. Coates has mastered the academic literature and from it he has come to understand that slavery was not “ancillary to American history” but “foundational.” It remains as a “ghost” all over American policy today, as Coates has demonstrated in his call for reparations to counter the enormous inequities of race reinforced by modern federal housing and zoning legislation.

In Coates’s view, whites have been urged away from their real history by myths that have hidden the violence and injustice at its core. America must reject Civil War narratives that have obscured the war’s origins in slavery, that have permitted unexamined celebration of Confederate gallantry, and that have turned the “mass slaughter of the war into a kind of sport in which one could conclude that both sides conducted their affairs with courage, honor and élan.” The “lie of the Civil War,” he explains, “is the lie of innocence.” It is a dream, a myth that has lulled and blinded white America as it denied and evaded so much of its past. White Americans “have forgotten the scale of theft that enriched them in slavery; the terror that allowed them, for a century, to pilfer the vote; the segregationist policy that gave them their suburbs.” It is the denial of this history that sustains an emollient innocence and makes the injustices of the present possible.

As John Hope Franklin learned when he undertook the research that he fashioned into From Slavery to Freedom, an understanding of history destroys innocence. And the brutal and undeniable truths of murders captured and shared on social media challenge our national presumptions of innocence as well. Can this unavoidable confrontation with the realities of our present open us in new ways to the meaning of our troubling past? Can history help relieve us once and for all of the burden of that ignorance and the evil it can produce? Are we as historians committed—and prepared—to seize this responsibility to extend history beyond the academy? Are we as a nation at last ready to welcome the truth that can yield reconciliation?

If so, it is in no small part because of the kind of history John Hope Franklin dared to write and the ideals he represented as he walked the “tightrope” between engagement and objectivity, as he struggled to unite history with policy and meaningful change, as he sought truths to save us all. Black Lives Matter. History Matters. John Hope Franklin showed us how much they matter to each other.

[Kind of Blue]

6. My Goodness, LMD! I thought: Where is the link to this

eloquent post? Because I want to read more! Your writing is exceptional. The history, the questions posed for the way forward have blown me away. There is so much food for thought in all of it and I am definitely keeping them as a guide as I pursue my study.

A few weeks ago, I listened to a TEDTalk by Bryan Stevenson. At one point he mentioned when he was a young attorney, Ms. Rosa Parks visited two of her female friends in Alabama every now and then, the organizer of the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the civil rights activists/wife of Dr. King's attorney. One of the women used to call Stevenson to say Ms. Parks is coming and would you like to come over and Listen - not join in the conversation but Listen, for hours as the three elderly women talked.

I bring this up because, for all it's worth, I can tell the difference in someone who has listened from one who hasn't. You are clearly a listener, LoveMyDog. Only a listener could speak so elegantly, pursuasively and with such emotion to produce A-level questions that could be an introduction to any well-taught history class.

Thank you, LoveMyDog. I feel blessed to know you.

[lovemydog]

7. Oh, it's an excerpt from the same article, KoB.

The article, entitled John Hope Franklin: Race & the Meaning of America, is written by Drew Gilpin Faust. It says in the biography about Ms. Faust: "Drew Gilpin Faust is the President and the Lincoln Professor of History at Harvard. She is the author, most recently, of This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War. Her essay in this issue is drawn from a speech she delivered in November at Duke to commemorate the one-hundredth birthday of the late historian John Hope Franklin.
 (December 2015)"
http://www.nybooks.com/contributors/drew-gilpin-faust/

It's one of those really long in-depth essays in the New York Review of Books. So I was quoting more of that essay by Ms. Faust. The entire article is worth reading here.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2015/12/17/john-hope-franklin-race-meaning-america/

I appreciate your kind words. We share a love of learning history as a way forward. I love that story from the TED Talk by Bryan Stevenson. Can you imagine sitting and listening to Rosa Parks, talking with two of her long-time female friends? What an honor to sit and listen. Thanks for sharing that anecdote here. One reason I love reading history is that you're listening to someone who has done so much research and has much to share.

When I was around 11 years old, a beloved great-aunt told me 'you're never alone with a good book because you have a friend who is telling you a wonderful story.' That's always stuck with me. We learn so much from great books and from essays like this one by Ms. Faust. So much more than just reading gossip or backbiting or the same hackneyed comments by the same repetitive people on some segments of message boards, lol. I love listening to everyone in this group. Everyone has such fascinating stories & thoughts to share.

I was at a party last night; some friends put together music shows in a relaxed loft setting, and they turn into small parties afterwards. Spent part of the evening listening to a guy talking about his life growing up in the Philippines, then moving to San Francisco and how he does documentary photography work for Vice magazine. We talked a bit about the value of history and the value of listening to older people who have so much to share. He said that sometimes he listens to his grandfather talk about the experiences he had, and how valuable that is to understanding where he came from and where he's going. I know I've been informed by discussions like the ones we have here in this group. We all have such interesting stories to share. Especially our elders. Well, the good ones who enjoy sharing. Of course, some aren't worth a damn listening to if they just rant and rave like mean spirited morons. But it's so cool to listen to good folks who enjoy sharing.

I feel blessed to know you too Kind of Blue.

[Kind of Blue]

8. Oh, I'm so sorry, LMD!

Ugh! I've got a full house this weekend and thought I'd read the whole thing. You sure quoted a great section!

Well, full house of family from out of town because my dad took a turn for the worse. But what came out of it were stories about her life my mother hadn't told us before. We were enraptured listening to her. Things about her grandfathers, grandmothers, and found out that one great-great-great-grandad came from Kenya. Kenya?!?!? Definitely time to do DNA to find out how far we've traveled in time.

Your listening and mine last night reminds me not only is written history so valuable but there's something almost magical or transcendent about oral history.

Here's to listening

[lovemydog]

9. Yeah, I love hearing stories in person.

What a gift to listen to you mom talking about ancestors going all the way beck to Kenya! I bet there's some historic registries you can research after all the extended family is gone. I'd be interested in hearing more.

We've had some family reunions & I'm always fascinated with where people came from, the struggles & joys in their experience. Some of my ancestors are from Scotland, some from Switzerland & Germany. Some came through Ellis Island & settled in the midwest. Teachers, farmers, military people, draft resistors, some whose lives revolved around the church choir. I even have an ancestor from Kansas who I'm told helped get free public education there.

Best of luck with your dad. Enjoy these precious times with family.